Haldighati to Iran: Why winning battles is not enough

June 21 is now synonymous with Yoga Day. Yet, it is also etched into the country’s historical memory for another reason. On this day, 450 years ago, a battle was fought on a rugged stretch of Rajasthan whose yellow rocks — as Sir Jadunath Sarkar notes in Military History of India — when crushed yield “a bright yellow sand looking exactly like the turmeric (haldi) powder”.

The place came to be known as Haldighati.

The Battle of Haldighati, fought on June 21, 1576, between the armies of Mughal emperor Akbar and Maharana Pratap of Mewar, occupies a unique place in the Indian imagination. Four and a half centuries later, the question is no longer who won the battle. It is why a ruler who lost it continues to inspire generations while many who won greater victories are remembered only in footnotes.

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For decades, sections of historiography have been attempting to dilute the character of Haldighati by portraying the Mughal endeavour as an early form of Indian nation-building in which both the Mughals and Rajputs worked hand in hand. Pratap, in sharp contrast, is shown as someone standing against Akbar’s nationalist project. There is no denying that a section of Rajputs worked with Akbar. In fact, at the Battle of Haldighati, the Mughal army was led by Raja Man Singh. Hailing from the Amber dynasty that had matrimonial alliances with the Mughals, Man Singh was a military general par excellence, and legends say he fought 67 battles and lost none. But then, to project Akbar’s endeavour as a sort of nation-building rests on an astonishing intellectual inconsistency. If Mughal expansion can retrospectively be called national integration, why should the same argument not apply to others, before and after them?

History is rarely monochromatic. Armies are ultimately defined by the political authority they serve. The British Indian Army was overwhelmingly Indian. That did not make British rule indigenous. Likewise, the presence of Rajput generals in Mughal service did not transform the battle into an intra-Rajput affair. Here, it needs to be emphasised that any attempt to villainise the likes of Man Singh and Jai Singh, while extolling Maharana Pratap and Shivaji, would be simplistic. The truer picture lies somewhere in the middle: while Pratap chose to fight from the outside, the likes of Man Singh and Jai Singh joined to fight from within, looking after Hindu interests. This may explain why Man Singh and many other Rajputs in Mughal courts not only patronised Hindu art, culture and scholarship, but also built, rebuilt and revitalised several temples.

As for Pratap, his relevance lies in the fact that — as RC Majumdar writes in The Mughul Empire — he “regains for posterity the soul of India”. Majumdar highlights how the “Maharana loses battles, but never gives up the principle for which he stands — independence… The great Shivaji will be proud to claim him as his ancestor, and the revolutionary movement in Bengal in the twentieth century will draw inspiration from his untiring fight against foreign domination”.

Haldighati, in that way, manifested the most dogged of human pursuit to regain the “soul of India”. This was an intensely fought battle. Despite the numbers on the battlefield being squarely in favour of the Mughals, with the latter enjoying a 3:1 numerical advantage over the Mewar army, Pratap, as Sarkar writes, “staked his all on a desperate frontal charge”, and “kept no disposable reserve nor rear guard, for any emergency”. The Mewar king followed what Captain Liddell Hart has called “the wild-boar rush of Marshal Pétain” in the First World War. In fact, the battle, at one point, became so intense that some Muslim commanders began shooting their arrows indiscriminately. At that moment, Badayuni, who accompanied the Mughal army, curiously asked a Mughal general how to distinguish between the imperial Rajputs and the Maharana’s men. The officer was brutally frank in his reply and declared: “Let them experience the whizz of arrows, be what may; for, to whichever side they may belong, their being killed will be a gain to Islam!”

Coming back to Pratap, his greatness lies not in military triumph but in strategic clarity: defeat is bearable, surrender is not. Unlike the romantic myths that often surround historical heroes, he did not enter Haldighati expecting a miraculous victory. He understood the balance of power. Pratap, therefore, prepared for losing the battle, but ultimately winning the war.

One can see the level of Mewar’s planning from the fact that when Man Singh reached Gogunda — Pratap’s temporary capital, where he was crowned in 1572 after the death of his father — a day after the Battle of Haldighati, he found it deserted. This could not have happened without meticulous planning and preparation. From Haldighati, the Maharana had rushed to Gogunda, collected his family, found an inaccessible hideout, organised his men and began to harass Akbar’s army. As Profs Lloyd I Rudolph and Susanne H Rudolph write in the introduction to Kesri Singh’s book, Maharana Pratap: The Hero of Haldighati: “Pratap… did not flee the battlefield in a manner inconsistent with the Rajput ethic. His withdrawal was strategic as well as tactical, both deliberate and planned.”

To this, Kesri Singh himself adds in the book: “The field no doubt remained with Man (Singh). But for the emperor’s army no victory was ever more like defeat; for Mewar, no retreat more glorious.”

It didn’t take Man Singh long to realise that he had won the battle but lost the war. Mughal forces found themselves trapped in hostile terrain. Supply lines were disrupted. Guerrilla attacks intensified. Victory on the battlefield failed to translate into political control. The Mughals were soon forced to retreat. Haldighati, thus, has shown that wars are not decided by military victories alone; they are won through civilisational endurance, moral legitimacy and the ability to sustain political purpose long after the battle is over.

The relevance of Haldighati lies in the fact that it kept repeating itself from one war front to another, yet states often failed to learn from it. The Americans had their Haldighati moment in Vietnam. The Soviets had it in Afghanistan. The United States had it again in Iraq and Afghanistan. And yet, it seems to be repeating the same in Iran. Washington failed to realise yet again that superior firepower can destroy armies, but it cannot destroy conviction. It once again underestimated the force of identity, memory and civilisation. No doubt, military strength matters. But societies fighting for what they perceive as their political or civilisational survival frequently prove more resilient than outside powers expect.

The challenge is greater in an age of what Umberto Eco calls “neowar”, which emerged after the 1991 Gulf War. In this “neowar”, no one is “meant to die” and it is fought on “the principle of maximum happiness and minimum sacrifice”. Neo-warfare makes it difficult to fight and sustain a conflict for long, especially for a democratic state or society, while an autocratic state faces no such constraints. Without defending Donald Trump’s unreasonable war in Iran, it can safely be said that this softening of democratic states and societies remains an area of great concern. A democratic state must realise that it survives as much on sagacity as on strength, as much on principles as on power.

Empires celebrate conquest, but civilisations remember resistance. This is the most enduring lesson of Haldighati.

(The writer is the author of the book, ‘Eminent Distorians: Twists and Truths in Bharat’s History’. The views expressed are personal and do not necessarily reflect the views of Firstpost.)